The telecom arm of Reliance Industries said that despite bilateral meetings, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular hardly added any PoIs over the last fortnight, worsening rapidly the rate of call drops, which is about 10 crore a day between Jio and incumbents.ETTelecom | September 20, 2016, 22:51 IST

Reliance Jio Infocomm fired a fresh salvo, alleging that incumbent operators' continued denial to requests for adequate points of interconnect (PoI) was aimed at hampering the company's entry into the sector, and ran afoul of license conditions and regulations on quality of service.

The telecom arm of Reliance Industries said that despite bilateral meetings, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular hardly added any PoIs over the last fortnight, worsening rapidly the rate of call drops, which is about 10 crore a day between Jio and incumbents.

"The deliberate move to not provide sufficient interconnection capacity, as is apparent from the above numbers, is clearly aimed at hindering RJIL's entry into the sector and is depriving Indian customers from enjoying superior HD voice services being offered by RJIL," the company said in a statement late Tuesday.

"The continued denial of requisite PoI's is in clear violation of the license conditions and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) regulations on quality of service by the incumbent operators," it added.

Jio, which launched its services on September 5, and incumbent telcos are engaged in a bitter war of words, with the former alleging inadequate points of interconnect (PoI) leading to failure of majority of calls made on its network. Incumbent telcos say they have substantially increased PoIs - required to take calls made on one network to another - but Jio differs. Market leader Airtel has also said that Jio is creating a controversy over PoIs to mask inadequacies in its own service.

While Jio said it required 4,000 - 5,000 PoIs immediately from each operator but in the last 15 days, Airtel added one, Vodafone added five and Idea added only three PoIs. In the last 10 days, only Vodafone added two, the company said, alleging that incumbents did not demonstrate any real intent to resolve this issue.

As of September 14, Airtel had operationalized 651 points of interconnect, while Vodafone had 467 and Idea Cellular had 526, Jio said in its statement, demanding more concrete action from the trio.

Jio reiterated its accusation of incumbents rejecting most of the mobile number portability (MNP) facility for its subscribers who wish to switch to Jio services, on unsubstantiated reasons.

Amid the verbal joust between the camps, Trai has sought data on congestion at the PoIs to assess whether there are efforts to prevent completion of calls from Jio to other networks. Data has been sought from September 15 to September 20.